We have hours. We might have less.
I sit on the cloak and he sits beside me and for a moment we just breathe. His face is stripped of everything — the composure, the calculation. What's left is just him. Tired and afraid and looking at me like I'm the last real thing in his vision.
"They built you to be empty," I say. "The cult, the Maw, thirty years of architecture. But you're not empty. You never were. You built protections for people you weren't required to protect. Yousat in a safehouse with me and told me you were afraid because I deserved to know." I hold his gaze. "You are not the thing they made. You are the things you chose in spite of it."
Something cracks in his face.
"I might not survive the severance," he says quietly.
"Don't die," I tell him. "That's my only condition for tonight."
"I'll do my best."
"Do better than your best."
He almost smiles. Then he kisses me.
It starts slow.The specific pace of two people who believe this might be the last time and are determined to make it count.
His mouth is warm and I kiss him back with everything I have, my hands in his hair, pulling him closer. He follows. He always follows when I pull — this man who controls everything will let me move him. That's the thing about him I didn't expect and can't stop being grateful for.
I get his coat off, his shirt. My hands find the scar across his ribs and press flat, and he makes a sound against my mouth so raw it does something irreversible to my chest.
"Lie back," I tell him.
He lies back and I straddle him and take my time — my shirt over my head slowly, watching his hands clench at his sides because he's letting me lead and it costs him. "You can touch me," I say. "You're allowed."
His hands come up like I've unlocked something. His mouth finds my throat, my breast, and I arch into it. "You're so fucking beautiful," he says against my skin, and the curse is what gets me — Sevareth does not curse, ever, and the fact that I've pulled it out of him feels like the most intimate thing between us.
His mouth closes around my nipple and sucks and my hips grind down against him. I can feel his cock hard through the last fabric between us and it's exquisite and not nearly enough.
We get the rest off. His hands drag up my thighs and I'm already wet — have been since he kissed me, since before that, since he burned his death plan because I asked. He slides a hand between my thighs and strokes me and I gasp and grab his shoulders.
"Like that?" Low and rough and attentive.
"Yes — god, like that?—"
He works me with his fingers until I'm shaking in his lap, forehead pressed to his, and the whole time he's watching my face with an expression that is not the Sevareth anyone else has seen. No composure. Just a man watching the woman he loves fall apart in his hands and finding it Mireculous.
"I want you inside me," I tell him. "Now. Please."
I wrap my hand around his cock and guide him and sink down slowly, inch by inch, watching his face shatter — eyes closing, jaw slack, hands tight on my hips, a sound that used to be my name before it got taken apart.
He fills me completely. I hold still, adjusting, feeling him deep and thick, and press my forehead to his.
"You feel—" he starts.
"Tell me."
"Like home," he says, and his voice cracks on it. "Like the only place the noise has ever stopped."
I move.Slow at first, rising and falling in my rhythm, and he lets me have it — hands steadying but not directing, mouth on my throat. Every roll of my hips draws a sound from him I feel in my own chest.
"Harder," I say against his mouth. My voice breaks because he thrusts up at exactly the right angle. "Fuck — there, right there?—"
He grips my hips and drives up and I brace against his shoulders and meet him thrust for thrust. Skin against skin, the wet slide of him inside me, his breathing ragged and mine worse — raw and desperate and nothing like performance. Two people choosing to be as alive as possible before the morning that might kill them.
"Look at me," he says.
